


speakers

by mandaestella



Series: montevallo [2]
Category: Actor RPF, Alexbelle, Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Hunger Games (Movies), The Hunger Games (Movies) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Childhood Friends, F/M, I'm so sorry, this is so self indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2020-01-01 02:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18326516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandaestella/pseuds/mandaestella
Summary: on may fifteenth, isabelle fuhrman disappears. after her best friend dies in a car crash, she leaves behind her life in seattle, heading back to her hometown in ontario, canada to live with alex, her childhood best friend. when she finds some orphaned geese, alex hatches a crazy plan to help them migrate south for the winter.or the fly away home au that no one asked for, but that i desperately needed.





	speakers

**Author's Note:**

> / you and me, wild and free  
> / way out in the woods, nobody for miles  
> / love in the back of the truck with the tailgate down  
> / just us and the speakers on  
> speakers by sam hunt
> 
> to everyone who has lost someone, to everyone who has lost themselves, to everyone who feels like they aren't good enough or strong enough or brave enough, i promise you that you are and you won't let yourself down.

On May fifteenth, Isabelle Fuhrman disappeared.

She left behind her life in Seattle, her apartment, her friends. She got on a plane and didn’t look back until she was two thousand miles away in Ontario. Isabelle had grown up there, but she hadn’t been back in years - there was no family waiting for her there. There was no one waiting for her anywhere. Not anymore.

It had been horrible, the car accident. One moment they were speeding along the interstate, rain falling in sheets around them as it was wont to do in the Pacific Northwest, and the next second they weren’t moving at all, the car upside down, shattered glass everywhere, and Leven completely still. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the ambulance taking Leven away, the one Isabelle was in right behind. She could still hear the paramedics talking in voices they thought she couldn’t hear, the phrase DOA burned into her brain, onto the backs of her eyelids, on every piece of paper that crossed in front of her.

And then there was their apartment, filled with the detritus of two people who had lived together for a long time. When Isabelle got home from the hospital, it was like she had been hit with a sledgehammer, her stomach aching from the pain of seeing Leven’s makeup spread out all over the coffee table, like she would be home any minute. Isabelle had always yelled at her for getting ready in the living room, and Leven cheerfully ignored her, sifting through bronzers and highlighters and brushes. “The light is better in here, Iz,” she would say. “I don’t know what to tell you.” And Isabelle would let it go because she always did, because Leven was her best friend, because she was (as usual) right.

Isabelle had been the lucky one. At least that’s what they said. She walked away from the crash with a concussion, a couple of broken ribs, and a sore neck. That was it. They said she should be grateful, that it could’ve been a lot worse. She didn’t see how.

That’s why she had to leave Seattle. Nothing would ever be the same again, so why should she pretend?

She hadn’t really made a solid decision to go. All of a sudden she just found herself finding someone to lease her apartment, unsure of where she was heading. It wasn’t until she booked a flight to Ontario that she realized she should make some arrangements for when she got there. That was where Alex came in.

Alexander Ludwig had been one of Isabelle’s best childhood friends, but she hadn’t seen him in six years, since the day they graduated high school. They hadn’t even kept in touch - once Isabelle was gone, she was gone. But he was right there when she sent him a text message, telling her he would pick her up at the airport and that she could stay with him until she got her feet under her.

Isabelle used to look on those people with disdain, the ones who never got out. All she had wanted in high school was to leave Canada. Interesting then, that she was the one coming back with her tail between her legs. And Alex being Alex, he never said a word about it, never accused her of being a bad friend, never blaming her for disappearing. He just took her back, no questions asked.

“The house is kind of messy,” Alex said as they pulled up his long driveway. “I didn’t have a chance to straighten up. Things have been crazy with work lately.”

Isabelle stared out the window, the Ludwig farm just how she had remembered it. Alex’s parents were long gone, leaving the farm to him and his siblings. Alex had always wanted it - plenty of room for him to fly, lots of space for him to spread out in, think, create. He was a sculptor, but what he really loved to do was tinker - even when they were little he was always taking things apart and seeing if he could put them back together. He had a couple of award winning inventions out there, enough to put some decent money in his pocket.

“That’s alright,” she said. “I’m not expecting anything from you, Alex. You don’t have to take care of me.”

He eyed her carefully as he turned off the truck. “Yes I do.”

She let it go for now. Alex had always had a savior complex.

The kitchen was bright and relatively clean save for the blueprints spread out everywhere. Alex hurriedly gathered them up, crumpling them together and shoving them into a drawer. “Your room is right there.” He gestured to a room just off the kitchen. “I cleared it out as best I could for now. I’ll get rid of the rest of it in the morning.”

Isabelle stepped inside, looking around. There were boxes piled up in the corner, Alex’s nearly illegible writing scrawled across each one. She always used to make fun of him, telling him he had doctor’s handwriting.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Alex said from behind her, still looking at her like she might explode. “You’ve had a long trip.”

And even with all the thoughts running through her brain, unanswered questions and doubt piling up like snowdrifts, she managed to fall asleep right away.

* * *

She had been dreaming about Leven, about Isabelle’s twenty-first birthday when Leven had insisted on cooking her breakfast even though Leven had no idea how to cook. Isabelle had been woken by the smell of burning French toast and Leven calling out that she was fine, everything was fine, no need to worry, it was under control.

It took her a second once she woke up to remember where she was. It wasn’t until she saw Alex out the window that she remembered – Ontario. Canada. Leven. It might’ve been too much first thing in the morning if she hadn’t immediately been distracted by what Alex was doing. Isabelle got out of bed, wrapping the blanket more tightly around her to peer out the window. 

He was harnessed into a glider, two sets of wings spreading out from either side of him. He was wearing a beanie and some sort of weird goggles, and as Isabelle watched, he hiked the contraption up higher on his shoulders, took a deep breath, and started running. It only took a few seconds for the air to catch beneath the wings, bolstering him up, and he was off the ground. He was flying. Isabelle ran out of the house as he disappeared behind it, watching him soar over the trees, the sunrise lighting up the sky behind him. He dangled from the glider as it turned in big swoops overhead, and she held her breath instinctively as it began losing altitude. Alex hit the ground running, but his momentum carried up faster than he could move his legs, and the glider fell face forward into the ground with a huge crash.

Isabelle couldn’t move, knew she should probably run out there, call someone, get some help, but her legs felt like cement. Alex wasn’t moving, and she was starting to panic when he wriggled backwards, extracting himself from the harness and standing up stiffly. “Whoo!” He raised his arms above his head when he saw her staring. “What a rush!” She shook her head, finally able to move as she whirled around, back into the house, slamming the door behind her.

Alex was in the shop all morning, working on some sort of giant dragon statue when she went to see him. He had a welding mask over his face, sparks flying from the tool in his hand. He shut it off when he saw her standing there, lifting up his mask. “What’d you think about the glider?” he asked. “Pretty impressive, right?”

She shrugged, wandering around the shop, which was packed to the brim with weird statues, raw material, and Alex’s welding equipment. “I wouldn’t go and brag about it.”

Alex snorted, not fussed at all by her attitude. “That was actually a pretty good landing for me.”

As he went back to work, she wandered to the rear of the barn. Mounds of hay dusted the floor, the rafters creaking overhead, sunlight illuminating the tiny tornados of dust swirling under her feet every time she took a step. That’s when she saw the tire swing. She had spent hours and hours here with Alex and his siblings when they were little, taking turns pushing each other and jumping off into the soft piles of hay. She touched the rope, pulling her hand back like it had burned her and backing away, the memories too much. 

Later that night, Isabelle had settled herself in Alex’s study while he made dinner, flipping through some of his blueprints. They were all iterations of gliders, some with two sets of wings like the one he had been flying this morning, some with one, some with different types of harnesses. All were carefully outlined and inked, Alex’s sloppy handwriting scratched across them with notes and specs.

“Is it supposed to smell like peanut butter?” she called out to him. The kitchen was full with the noise of something sizzling in a pan, smoke rising up from the stove.

“You remember this, it’s Moo Goo Guy in a Pan.”

“I really don’t think that’s what it’s called.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’ll remember it from when we were little. It’s got a real peanutty taste, yeah?”

Isabelle had just opened her mouth to answer, a smile spreading across her face for the first time in a while when the front door opened and someone peeked around it. It was a woman about her age with bleached blonde hair and piercing gray eyes. When she saw Isabelle she smiled sheepishly, pushing the door the rest of the way open and stepping inside.

“Hello.” She had a tiny bit of a French accent, softening her words as she spoke. “You must be Isabelle.”

Isabelle didn’t say anything, Alex coming around the corner with a dish towel draped over his shoulder, spatula in one hand. “Hey Gaia.” He kissed the woman on the cheek quickly. “Isabelle, this is Gaia.”

Isabelle stood up, pausing for a second before taking Gaia’s outstretched hand. Neither Alex nor Gaia offered any explanation for who she was or why she was standing in the foyer, and Isabelle didn’t have the energy to ask. The awkward silence was broken by Gaia asking, “Is something burning?” seconds before the fire alarm went off.

“Oh shit!” Alex bolted back to the kitchen, waving the dish towel around wildly to clear the smoke. In the commotion Isabelle escaped to her room, slamming the door shut behind her.

“Well, that went well,” she heard Alex say.

Isabelle locked the door, just in case, sitting on the floor in front of her trunk. She took a deep breath, opening it up. Pictures of her and Leven covered the inside of the lid, taped there messily, Isabelle grabbing them at the last second before leaving her apartment behind. There were dozens of them, from parties and bars and holidays, at the beach and on Mount Rainier and at the pier. Isabelle touched one softly, the photo worn and soft beneath her fingers. She could hear Gaia and Alex talking, their words indistinguishable, and she fell asleep to the sound of their voices, the picture still clutched tight between her fingers.

It was another good night’s sleep, a product of fresh air and emotion and maybe just plain exhaustion. Once again, Isabelle awoke with a start, this time because of the noise. She sat up in bed, could see the bulldozer straight out her window as it trundled through the forest on the line of Alex’s property, trees falling in its wake, geese honking as they quickly took flight. And then there was Alex, running across the field in his underwear, house shaking as the door slammed shut behind him.

She could hear him through the window. “Hey!” he screamed, hopping a fence without even slowing down. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He could barely be heard over the roar of the bulldozer now. “We haven’t had the meeting yet, we haven’t voted, you don’t have a permit!” More geese took off, making their escape over the roof of the house. “This is totally illegal!” The bulldozer didn’t stop, making a wide turn and taking another swath of trees down with it. Alex let out another roar, turning around dejectedly to see Isabelle staring at him from her window.

At least it was never boring here.

He showed up in her room a few minutes later, fully clothed and looking a little sheepish. “Sorry about that,” he said as she quickly pulled a sweater over her head. “It’s a whole big thing.”

“You don’t have to explain,” she said, looking up at him.

He shrugged. “It’s your house now too.”

A walk would clear her head, she thought. There had been so much going on since she got to Ontario, with Gaia showing up and Alex running around with wings strapped to his back. Plus there was the simple fact that she had seen her childhood best friend practically naked, only hours after meeting his girlfriend. Yeah. A walk would be good.

She slipped out of the house when Alex was in the shower, not wanting to explain why she was leaving or where she was going. She heard the water shut off as she stepped out the front door and closed it quickly behind her, scanning the expanse of property. It would be only a second before he came downstairs, and she started off quickly towards what was left of the tree line.

Isabelle made it into the cover of trees, fallen trunks all around her, still stripped bare from the winter. She stepped over them carefully, debris surrounding her - clods of dirt, ripped up from the ground, piles of dead leaves, stones overturned. That’s why it took her a little while to see them - in fact, Isabelle was almost on top of them and narrowly avoided stepping on them.

Eggs, at least a dozen of them, large and smooth, scattered from their nest but still fully intact. They were clearly abandoned, the adult birds long gone in the chaos. Goose eggs - Isabelle recognized them from her childhood. It only took a few seconds before the idea came into her head - she was going to take them. She couldn’t just leave them out here after all; there was no chance in hell they would make it. She ran back to the house, sneaking in quietly and thankfully not seeing Alex - no way she could explain herself with this one. She grabbed a pillowcase and as many scarves as she had her possession before making her way back to the trees, packing the eggs in carefully, fabric layered in between for cushion.

Alex was in the barn by this point, so Isabelle snuck in the back way. The air was cold, sparks from the welding torch flying everywhere. Alex had his back turned as she crept in and grabbed a light from his work bench; he wouldn’t miss one tiny light. There was an old dresser in a room off the hay loft; Isabelle suspected Alex had moved some mismatched furniture out of the house once his parents had left for Florida. She had it under good authority that during the winter he moved his motorcycle into the house. Isabelle worked quickly; the eggs had been abandoned since early morning at least. She spread the scarves out inside a drawer of the dresser, carefully laying each egg inside on its own little nest, and settled the light on a tray in the drawer beneath, illuminating the entire dresser with a soft warm glow. 

Now she would just have to wait.

She ran back inside, throwing her jacket on the couch, and nearly got the fright of her life when a mound of blankets sat up and let out a yell. “Holy-”

Whoever it was jumped up from the couch after fighting for a second to get out from underneath the blanket nest. “Oh, Belle, hey.”

Only the people who knew her as a kid called her Belle - that’s when she realized who this was. Nicholas, Alex’s little brother. All of the Ludwig siblings had stayed in Ontario after the retirement of their parents, she knew, but it had completely slipped her mind until she saw another one standing in front of her. “Oh my God, Nick.” She pressed her palm flat against her chest, trying to see how fast her heart was beating. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry,” he smiled sheepishly, the same grin Alex had shot her a hundred times as a kid when they would get in trouble together. “I got in late last night, and Alex didn’t want to wake you up.”

“Why are you sleeping on the couch?”

He shrugged. “Spare room is taken after all, yeah? I came in to help Alex finish up some big projects. Can’t afford to get behind, not with summer coming up.”

Isabelle nodded slowly. “Alright, well…” She stepped backwards towards her room. “I’m gonna go, uh, shower.”

“What’ve you got there?” He gestured towards the pillowcase she had clutched behind her back.

“Oh, that - that’s, uh…” Isabelle searched her brain wildly for an excuse but came up with nothing. “Gotta go!” 

It was weird to see Nick all grown up. It was weird to see Alex all grown up for that matter. The three of them had always been inseparable, with Nick’s twin sister usually tagging along too. But they had grown apart during high school; Isabelle kept tabs on them, sure, watched Alex date everyone in sight, watched him get better and better at creating, watched as he walked across the stage at graduation. Nothing had happened; they’d just drifted apart as people were likely to do. And then after she left… nothing. And now here Alex was, his own farm, his own business, people wanting his art. So much had changed for him, and at the same time, really nothing had changed.

But he was there. When Isabelle’s life fell apart, he was the only one there, whether she liked it or not.

Isabelle watched from her window as Nick headed towards the barn, and her heart sank. There was no way she could get away with checking the eggs if both Nick and Alex were in there. To her dismay, they stayed there all day, not even breaking for lunch or dinner. She got more and more antsy as the sun lowered in the sky, just brushing the horizon when the door burst open. She jumped up from where she had been sitting in the living room, checking her e-mail, but was disappointed to see that it was only Gaia. She didn’t even bother to try to disguise her eye roll.

“Hey Isabelle,” Gaia said tentatively. Isabelle let out a grunt of acknowledgement. “We’re going to the town meeting tonight, Alex and I,” she continued, like she thought they were actually having a conversation. “It’s about the land behind the house and whether or not we can-” Isabelle had already tuned her out.

Alex and Nick came rushing back into the house a few moments later, Alex yelling out his apologies and racing up to his bathroom to take a shower. Isabelle stood up quickly, planning her escape, when she saw Nick approach Gaia and put his arms around her, kissing her in a way that was decidedly not friendly. What the hell was going on?

Nick turned around. “So you met my girlfriend already, right, Belle?”

She couldn’t help it; she stood there and stared at them. “Your… uh… your-”

“Girlfriend?” Nick raised a sandy blonde eyebrow at her.

“I thought - I just assumed…” And before either of them could say another word, she backed out of the room, making her escape. 

“We’re going to be late, Alex,” she heard Gaia yell through the door. More than anything, Isabelle was just embarrassed. What was it to her who Alex was dating? They’d had completely separate lives for six years; obviously he could do whatever he wanted. It was just stupid of her to convince herself she had any sort of claim over him, even though she had known him longer. She’d known all of the Ludwigs longer. 

Deep down she knew that wasn’t really the problem. The problem was when she saw Gaia, she saw Leven. She had no idea if the two were even similar, but she saw Leven everywhere these days - in the rocks, in the trees, in the sun setting over the house, in her dreams every time she closed her eyes. When it rained. 

There was a knock on the door, startling her from her thoughts. “Yeah?”

Alex eased it open, appearing in the crack between the door and the frame. “I just wanted to let you know I’m heading out for the vote. It’ll probably go pretty late, but Nick will be here if you need anything.” He shifted uncomfortably, and Isabelle felt bad all of a sudden. He had only been nice to her since she had gotten here, opening his life to her, trying to make her feel at home. 

She stood up, putting her hand on his arm. “I’ll be okay, Alex. Promise.”

He smiled, looking down at her. She always forgot how tall he was until they were standing right next to each other. “Okay.”

Isabelle hovered around anxiously for the next couple of hours until Nick finally fell asleep in front of the television. The second she heard him snore, she grabbed her jacket and slipped out of the house, running through the grass, carefully making her way to the barn. 

* * *

Five minutes into the meeting and Alex was already on his feet. “We can’t just give up this land,” he said to the group of people sitting around him, addressing them as much as the moderator of the vote. “If we vote yes on this, if we let them bulldoze the woods, where does it stop?” Gaia was nodding next to him.

A man Alex knew only vaguely stood up once he was done. “My name is Jack,” he said, “and I’m a farmer. I don’t know about the rest of you, but my crops aren’t worth very much anymore. I need to sell this land so I can send my kids to college someday.”

“It’s not so much this project that worries me.” One of the park rangers, Sam something or other, spoke up. “Not as much as the ones that might follow in its wake. These streams and forests and wildlife, once they’re gone we can’t get them back. We need to think about the future of our land, of what we’re leaving for those who come after us.”

The permit did not pass.

They tried to sneak back into the house as quietly as possible; it was practically eleven o’clock by the time they made it back to the farm. Nick was fast asleep in front of the television, mouth wide open, a Saturday Night Live rerun on low in the background. “Hey.” Alex nudged him awake. “Nick.” He woke up slowly, blinking his eyes against the light of the television and yawning hugely. “Did everything go okay?”

“I… what?”

“With Isabelle. She okay?”

And that was when Nick realized he hadn’t seen her all evening.

It took only one glance into Isabelle’s bedroom, door wide open, lights off, empty, for panic to set in. The three of them were out the door with flashlights, screaming her name into the wide empty, dark, open night. “What the hell,” Nick was muttering to himself. “How the hell did I fall asleep?”

Alex was the first to burst into the barn, light piercing through the darkness and falling over Isabelle’s feet where she was sprawled out in the hay, a dozen tiny birds - geese? - crawling around her. They were clearly newly hatched, still a little damp from being inside their eggs but starting to fluff up, their downy fur standing out in inky blotches against the pale straw. Alex spotted a blanket on the hay next to her and crept up to drape it over her, the goslings still hopping around underneath.

“Is she okay to sleep here?” Gaia had snuck up behind Alex.

He didn’t get a chance to answer when Isabelle woke up with a start, sitting up and looking around, her gaze alighting on Alex and Gaia. She looked down sheepishly. “Can we keep them? Please?”

That was how Alex found himself at the park station, talking to the park ranger who had spoken at the permit vote the night before, Sam. “Alex, right?” he asked as Alex walked up to the desk, hands shoved in his pockets. 

“Yeah, hey.”

“What can I help you with?”

“Well.” Alex cleared his throat. “My… roommate found some geese eggs on the land they bulldozed behind my farm, and they hatched last night, and now I’ve got a whole mess of birds running around my house, and I’ve got basically no clue what to do with them.”

Sam laughed good-naturedly, like this was something he heard every day. “Well you’ve just inherited a lot more trouble than you thought, unfortunately.”

“Why’s that?”

“Geese learn everything from their parents. What to eat, how to fly, when to migrate, where to migrate to. Without that knowledge, they basically won’t be able to do anything. Also if your roommate—”

“Isabelle.”

“If Isabelle was the first person they saw when they hatched, then that means they’ve imprinted on her.”

“Imprinted?”

“It would have happened in the first few hours after they were born. Basically what it means is they’ll follow her anywhere.”

Alex nodded, trying to take everything in. “So what do I do right now?”

“For now, just feed them any sort of unmedicated feed, anything from duck or chicken starter to crushed Cheerios or vegetables.” Alex nodded, quickly whipping out his phone to take notes. “Tell you what, why don’t I stop out in the next couple of days, take a look at them, see what I can do.”

“That would be great.” Alex stuck out his hand for Sam to shake. “Thanks so much.”

It was a gorgeous spring day, not a hint of winter chill left in the air. When Alex pulled up and parked the truck, he saw Isabelle out on the lawn with the geese, Nick sitting on the ground watching her. Wherever Isabelle went, the geese went. If she sped up, so did they. If she took a sharp turn, they were right there behind her, their little legs carrying them as fast as they could.

It was only a week later when Sam showed up at the house. He spent some time out by the barn, watching the geese with Isabelle before Gaia invited him into the house for dinner. The geese were still too young to be left outside by themselves, so they followed Isabelle into the house. She had to keep pushing them off her lap while the rest of them ate.

“Here’s the problem with domesticated geese,” Sam said, pushing his plate back and wiping his mouth. “When they start to migrate, they don’t know where to go because they haven’t had their parents around to teach them the routes. See, they only have to learn it once and they can find their way back to where they started. They’ll know it forever.”

Isabelle glanced down at the baby goose on her lap, the one she called Feathers, as Sam continued. “They know they have to migrate because they can feel it. But they have no clue how to do it. So they just take off, and they fly into power lines, highways, people’s lawns. We’re constantly getting calls to remove them.”

“What do you do about that?” Alex asked, taking a sip of his water.

“Well, that’s why we have a law specifically for domesticated geese or other birds. Basically it says that all domestically raised birds have to be pinioned.”

Isabelle jerked her head up. “No.”

Alex frowned. “What am I missing here? What is pinioning?”

Sam reached down onto the ground, picking up one of the geese running around his feet and pulling something out of his pocket. “It’s really simple. You just shave a little bit off the top of the wing here—” He had barely taken the razor to the goose’s wing when Alex, Gaia, and Isabelle were all on their feet, Gaia and Isabelle screaming and Alex practically flipping the table in his effort to get across it and grab the baby goose from Sam.

“What the hell are you doing?” Isabelle was shrieking, grabbing the bird from Alex and running into her room, slamming the door behind her as soon as the rest of the geese were inside.

Alex had Sam by the collar and was pushing him outside. “Get the hell off my property!” he yelled as Sam stumbled down the stairs.

“If your birds fly,” Sam said, one hand on the door of his cruiser, “I’m going to have to confiscate them.”

Gaia was pounding on Isabelle’s door furiously. “Isabelle, come on, please open up.”

Alex joined her. “Isabelle, I’m sorry, I had no idea he was going to do that.” But her light stayed off and the door stayed closed, and eventually they gave up.

Alex was in the shop early the next morning, so early the sun wasn’t even up yet. He had the welding torch all fired up when a truck pulled up in front of the barn. He shut the torch off to move to another part of the sculpture when he heard a voice. “You’ve been missing some real good flying lately.”

He whirled around. “Natalie!”

Natalie wasn’t around much. She was almost always traveling; like her big brother she was really into flying. Unlike Alex, she got her kicks from jumping off cliffs and trying to find thermals, the ones that could keep her up for hours. Last he’d spoken to her she was in Brazil for the winter, where para-hawking was still legal. He gave her a big hug, trying to keep his dirty gloves away from her clean flannel. 

“This is sick,” she said, walking around the dragon, reaching out to touch it in places, running a hand over each individual scale, a small detail that had taken Alex ages to get right. 

“You want some coffee?”

“Always.”

Gaia was puttering around the kitchen, getting breakfast ready as Nick sat at the kitchen table, letting out big yawns every now and then. Isabelle and the geese were nowhere to be found. As soon as Natalie walked through the door, Nick jumped up, giving his twin sister a huge hug.

They were all sitting around drinking coffee and eating Gaia’s French toast when they heard a huge thud and a yelp of pain from the bathroom, followed by the sounds of a dozen geese making a ruckus. Another yelp of pain, and Alex was jumping up out of his seat. He burst into the bathroom to see Isabelle sprawled on the floor of the shower, water raining down on her, and the geese scattered around her feet.

“Alex, what the hell?” she shrieked, and he quickly slapped his hand over his eyes, running straight into the door jamb in his haste to get out of the bathroom. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this only caused more chaos, Nick appearing in the doorway behind Alex to see what was going on.

It took Natalie and Gaia busting their way in, physically muscling the guys out of the bathroom, and slamming the door in their faces for everything to calm down. They turned around and looked at Isabelle, who had managed to throw on her robe; she was sitting on the tile floor next to the shower, head buried in her arms, shoulders shaking.

“Isabelle…” Gaia said tentatively, edging closer to put her hand on Isabelle’s shoulder. The geese were hopping around across the floor of the bathroom. “Isabelle, are you okay?”

Natalie sat down next to her. “Belle, what’s wrong?”

When Isabelle finally raised her head, they realized she was laughing, so hard she was almost crying. This set the other girls off too, and before long they were all leaning over clutching their stomachs and wiping tears off their faces. 

“This is the happiest I’ve been in a while since… since everything happened,” Isabelle offered up once they had all quieted. 

Gaia was the first to speak up. “I know we’re not Leven. And I’m really sorry you’ve gone through so much… I can’t imagine. But we’ll be your friends if you let us.”

“We’re here, Belle.”

After the shower incident, as they had all come to call it, things changed completely. Isabelle was happier, almost back to her old self, the one the three Ludwigs remembered from their childhood. The girls became inseparable – they spent hours out on the grounds of the farm playing with the geese. It was a common sight to see them on the four wheelers, puttering around the farm with the birds toddling in a line behind Isabelle’s.

She talked about Leven now – not much and nothing in detail, but a comment in passing. It was enough to keep her spirit alive.

* * *

It was finally starting to feel like summer, the chill of the Canadian spring finally dissipating and giving way to a muggy heat. Alex had finally gotten a few big orders off his plate and out of the shop, leaving him a little room to relax.

He was sitting in the shop with Nick, flipping through some old blueprints, planes that he had never gotten off the ground, gliders that had never been built, a few kitchen inventions, and one or two improvements for the four wheelers. 

“How fast do they fly again?” he asked Nick, who was sitting at the computer, reading over a few project abstracts. 

Nick took a second to Google Alex’s question. “Thirty-one miles an hour.”

“You’re kidding me.”

Nick shook his head. “Nope.”

Alex was twirling a goose feather between his fingers. “That’s crazy.”

“Bernoulli’s principle and all that. Air travels faster over the top of the wing. Ergo lift, ergo flight.”

“Ergo…” Alex jumped up. “That’s it!”

It only took them about a week and a half to put that principle to work in a brand new invention, Alex’s first ever gas-powered glider. Having Nick and Natalie around was working wonders for his creativity; Nick understood the physics of flight better than anyone Alex knew and Natalie had the practical hours under her belt. 

They were up on the hill early one morning, the new glider strapped onto Alex’s back. “Alright, here’s the kill switch,” Natalie said, pushing a flat piece of plastic attached to a cord between Alex’s teeth. “If you let go of that for any reason, the engine will stop and you’ll just come back down slow.”

“Got it,” he said, teeth clenched tightly around the switch. Nick, standing behind him, pulled the starter, the engine roaring to life. 

“Let’s give it a try,” Nick called over the rumble, and Alex got a running start, leaving the ground quickly. He floated over the trees and fields for a full minute before he let go of the kill switch, gliding back down to earth. It looked like it was going to be a smooth landing until the very last second. He hit the ground too fast, losing control of his legs, and slammed into the ground.

Nick and Natalie, standing on the hill with their arms crossed, watching, looked at each other. “We need a bigger engine.”

“Yep, definitely.”

Meanwhile the girls were dealing with their own mini crisis; the geese had been running along behind the four wheelers, like they always did, and one of the geese had taken a big fall. It was the little one, the one whose wing Sam had shaved off. Gaia had noticed right away, running over to grab him, but he had been limping around ever since. Isabelle hadn’t let go of him since.

The girls came out to watch the flight of Alex’s second gas-powered glider a week later. “Bigger engine,” Nick said, feeding Alex the kill switch. “You could fly the Empire State with this thing.”

“I really hope so,” Alex ground out. “I’m trusting you, brother.”

“We got you.” Natalie slapped him on the back, starting the engine. It was a smoother take off than the last trial run, but Alex landed hard, taking a little bit longer to get up. 

“Holy shit.” He stood up slowly, cracking his neck. “My knees can’t take this much longer.”

They took a break from the test flights to refine their blueprints, make everything a little bit easier. Isabelle was sitting in the shop with the geese as the boys worked, scattering chicken feed on the ground. “This one’s Feathers,” she was telling Nick, and he let out a snort. “Scruffy… Ace… Winnie…”

“What about that one?” Alex asked, pointing to the goose sitting on her lap, the one who had gotten hurt.

“I don’t know.” She was stroking his feathers softly. 

Nick pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, looking up from his sketchbook. “Well you don’t want to give him a complex.”

“How about Maverick?”

Isabelle smiled at Alex’s suggestion. “Maverick is good. I like that.”

Maverick he was. 

After another three weeks of working day and night, they had a legitimate plane. Alex would no longer have to work running take offs and landings - no more chance of messing up his knees or hips or back. They rolled it out onto the sprawling side lawn, grass newly trimmed into a runway. 

Everyone watched nervously as Alex took off, the plane gently lifting into the sky. It was such a drastic change from the rough and tumble of the glider, and everyone was in high spirits after the first couple of test flights. They had finally done it - their own plane.

The five of them celebrated that night with a nice dinner. It was afterwards as they were all sitting around the dinner table that Alex first voiced his idea.

“You know the geese are going to start migrating soon, right?” He put down his glass of wine, directing his question towards Isabelle.

She cleared her throat. “Yeah. I guess I hadn’t really thought about that.”

“They can’t migrate on their own,” Nick said. “I’ve been reading about it. They’re gonna get hit by cars or fly into power lines or something.”

“Well I’ve had an idea,” Alex said. “They follow you everywhere, right? Even on the four wheeler.”

“Yeah…”

“So. What if I can get them to follow my plane?”

There was silence for a full thirty seconds before they all started talking over each other.

“There’s no way-”

“Are you serious-”

“Follow the plane-”

“No idea-”

Isabelle finally stepped in. “What are you saying exactly?”

“If we teach them the route, they’ll be able to do it on their own after the first flight. I’ll map it out and I’ll fly them down south.”

Everyone looked to Isabelle for her reaction.

“Alex. They’re never going to follow you.”

He paused. “Maybe not. But they might if you help me.”

Alex and Isabelle got up early the next morning, freeing the geese from the cage Alex had built on the side lawn. Nick, Natalie, and Gaia migrated outside to watch when they woke up, yawning and holding cups of coffee. At first Alex just sat back to observe as Isabelle put the geese through their paces. “Do you really think this is going to work?” Gaia muttered to him quietly; all he could do was shrug. He really had no idea, but the truth was he felt responsible for Isabelle, and - by extension - the geese, which was never a situation he thought he would be in but that’s really what life was about, wasn’t it?

“Do you want to try now?” Isabelle called, breaking Alex out of his thoughts. He stood up, brushing grass off his sweatpants.

“How do you want to do this?”

“Well…” Isabelle tapped a finger on her chin. “Maybe we should start with you running next to me. Then after a while, I’ll tap out and hopefully they’ll just keep going with you.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that could work.”

It did not work.

No matter what they did, the geese were attached to Isabelle’s side. If Alex was right next to her, sure, it was like they were following him. But the second Isabelle peeled off, so did the birds. They were all getting frustrated, Gaia and N-squared running beside them, trying to herd the geese in the right direction. 

It wasn’t until after they took a break for lunch that they finally had a breakthrough. Alex couldn’t explain why it happened, or even how really; they hadn’t tried anything different. It was just an almost imperceptible change; like all of a sudden, the geese noticed Alex too, and when Isabelle stepped aside, they continued to follow him.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. It was one thing for the geese to follow Alex on the ground - it was entirely another for them to follow his plane. None of them were sure how to go about teaching them. For the next few days, they continued to do some ground work, making sure that what had happened wasn’t just a fluke. As soon as they were sure that it wasn’t, that the geese were actually intentionally following Alex, they started formulating a plan.

Nick was the one in charge of the logistics of everything; he was constantly on his phone or scribbling in his work notebooks, calculating wind speed, optimum altitude, temperature, and whatever else it was that he was doing. He was the one they looked to when they had no idea what they were doing. 

But even Nick didn’t really know what to do this time. Eventually they decided that the simplest plan would be the best one. They were just going to set the geese free - open the cage door and see what they would do when faced with a plane.

Alex and Nick were pushing the plane out to the side lawn, the geese milling around, half of them scampering after Alex and the other half stepping over each other to sit on Isabelle’s lap. As soon as the plane was all set up and ready to go, Alex strapping on his flight helmet and sliding into place, Isabelle led her geese over to him, letting them explore the plane. Of course, the second they turned it on, the geese scattered, Isabelle patiently leading them back.

“Alright,” Alex called over the roar of the engine. “Let’s do this thing.”

The geese didn’t move, sticking close to Isabelle as the plane soared over the trees high above them. The same thing happened the second time and the third and the fourth.

Eventually the ground crew got their routine down to a science. As Alex rolled forward, getting set up for a take off, Gaia stationed herself next to the door of the cage, hand on the rope that would release the locking mechanism. Isabelle was standing next to her, ready to lead the charge. Nick and Natalie were in place on either side of the cage, all set to run after the geese urging them along.

They must have looked like idiots - running and screaming next to fifteen geese. Nick had his flannel shirt pulled up over his head, flapping his arms like wings. Isabelle had completely lost her voice from screaming, but no matter how much she screamed, the geese stayed firmly planted on the ground.

“Maybe you should hide,” Natalie suggested after a dozen or so trial runs, no progress made whatsoever. 

Isabelle shrugged. “Can’t hurt, right?”

So on trial number thirteen, as Gaia released the geese and Nick and Natalie urged them along, Isabelle made a beeline for the trees, crouching down in a small hole within the brush, out of sight of the field. She heard a big commotion, wings flapping, Nick screaming, voice hoarse. For a second her heart jumped, thinking they’d done it, but then there were full-grown geese swarming her, hopping into her hiding place.

Damn it.

They decided to take a break for dinner, resume the next day. They were all getting frustrated, and that wasn’t productive. Alex touched down, shaking his head and pulling off his flight helmet, slamming it down on the seat of the plane once he’d unfolded himself, standing up and rubbing his bad shoulder.

They didn’t speak much at dinner, all lost in their own thoughts. Nick barely ate anything, absorbed in his notebook, scribbling down notes. Gaia practically fell asleep at the table, exhausted from emotions, late nights, and early mornings. Finally Isabelle excused herself, going to her room and laying in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to come up with something - anything - that could solve their problems.

The five of them decided to take the morning off. Alex had some stuff to finish for an order, and they were all getting too frustrated to be productive. Even so, Gaia still woke up early, used to the five in the morning wake up calls they had been sticking to for the past few weeks. 

She lay in bed next to Nick, moving around restlessly until he finally woke up. “What are you thinking?” he asked sleepily, his voice rough from the early morning and all the yelling they’d been doing.

She rolled towards him, propping her head up on her arm, her long blonde hair brushing his shoulder. “This isn’t gonna work.”

“You’ve gotta be optimistic about it.”

“We’re all used to Alex’s crazy plans. We’ve been there for it for years. We’re used to things not working out. She’s not used to it.”

Nick sighed, sitting up and pulling Gaia towards him. “She does know Alex though. She knows he’ll do anything he can for her.”

“Isn’t that the problem?” Gaia pulled back, looking him in the eye. “He’ll do anything - but is it really worth it? Is this really worth it?”

He started to answer when they heard a whine from the side yard - it was the distinct sound of an engine starting. At first they didn’t think anything of it; Alex was a habitual early morning flier, preferring to get some fresh air when he couldn’t sleep. But then they heard Alex thundering down the stairs, Natalie right behind him, and they jumped up, pushing through the door of their bedroom to see Alex making a beeline for the front door, shirtless, barely managing to pull on his sweatpants before he was out the door.

“What the hell,” Nick asked Natalie, hot on Alex’s heels, “is happening?”

They followed quickly, Alex already halfway to the side field when they put two and two together. Isabelle was in Alex’s plane, weaving around the side yard as if drunk. Alex was screaming his head off, but no one could hear him. The geese were hot on Isabelle’s tail, some of them already starting to take off. They watched in horror as it happened; she didn’t even manage to get off the ground for more than a couple of seconds before she lost control completely, the plane spinning off course and crashing into the fence at the far side of the field, wheels still spinning and the geese right in the middle of it, crawling over the frame of the plane to where Isabelle was laying on her back, completely still.

Alex was at her side in a second, screaming her name.

“Oh my God,” he kept saying over and over, “oh my God, Isabelle, oh my God, are you okay, please be okay, talk to me, please, talk to me.” The words were pouring out of him as he skidded to a stop next to her, dropping to the ground, his hands floating over her, checking for breaks or cuts.

In the few seconds it took her to respond, he could’ve sworn his heart had actually stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she ground out. “I just wanted to see if they would do it.”

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Alex said, leaning over her, grabbing her hand when she tried to pull off his flight helmet. “Isabelle, don’t, just be still.”

“I’m okay, I promise.” She worked her way out of the helmet. “I crashed your plane, Alex, I’m so sorry.”

“Stop it.” Alex cradled her head in his hands, leaning down and burying his face in her neck. “I don’t care, I don’t care about the fucking plane.”

“Alex.” She tried to pull back, get a clear look at his face. “Alex, you’re crying.”

Isabelle was all right, a little sore and a whole lot embarrassed. Alex put her to bed immediately, all but threatening her to stay there. “The plane is fine, Isabelle, I swear,” he had to keep telling her. “Not even a scratch – they’re built to crash, you know that.”

Natalie and Gaia basically refused to leave her side, Nick and Alex left to their own devices once they were sure she was going to be okay. 

“I was thinking,” Alex said to Nick as they sat around the kitchen table, voices low in case the girls were sleeping.

“That’s never good.”

“Shut up.”

“Go on.”

“The truth is they’re not gonna follow me in the plane. I’m not Isabelle, and they don’t trust me like that. If I had been the first one they’d seen when they came out of those freakin’ eggs, this would be a different discussion.”

“So that’s it, we’re giving up?”

“No.” Alex looked behind him, making sure the girls couldn’t hear. He lowered his voice. “What if she flies them instead?”

“What?”

Nick looked up. It was Gaia who had spoken, standing behind them, an empty water glass in her hand.

“Oh shit,” Alex muttered.

“You want Isabelle to fly the geese south. After what just happened. Are you fucking kidding me?”

“It could work. We’ll teach her how to fly. They’ll follow her. We saw that. When she was in my plane, they were all ready to go. It’s a simple solution.”

“A simple solution?” Gaia was getting louder and louder. “She almost died out there! You cannot be serious!”

“I think it’s a great idea.” 

They all turned around. Isabelle was up.

“Sorry,” Natalie said, standing next to her with a shrug. “She got away from me.”

“You do?” Alex asked.

“It’s brilliant. The geese follow me, I follow you - we all head south.”

The biggest fight yet broke out, with Gaia and Nick firmly against the idea. 

“How else are we going to do it-”

“Her life in danger-”

“Can’t speak for her-”

“Someone has to do it-”

“I thought you liked the geese-”

“I do like the geese!”

In the end, Isabelle and Alex won out, wearing down Gaia until she was finally on board. Nick came to them the next day with a few different flight options. “I want the safest one on the market,” Alex had told him. “I don’t care about price or any of that bullshit. It’s got to be safe and she has to be able to learn to fly it in the shortest amount of time possible.”

“Alright.” Nick opened up his laptop at the kitchen counter as Isabelle made breakfast, Alex sprawled out across the counter. “This is what I’ve found.” Alex sat up, peering over his shoulder. “It’s the safest ultralight out there, tops out at thirty, thirty-five miles an hour, got the flight bar instead of a stick… I’d go with this one if I were you.”

Alex nodded, grabbing his sketchbook. “You think they can do something like this?”

“Holy shit.” Nick leaned closer to Alex’s drawing. “That is sick.”

“Let me see.” Isabelle made a grab across the counter for Alex’s sketch, barely missing it as he held it out of her reach. 

“You’ll see it when it’s delivered and not a second before that.”

It was a rush order, taking a little longer than normal for Alex’s customizations, but the plane was in their front yard in less than a week. Isabelle had been bugging Alex every single day, asking him what it was going to look like, but he’d held out, not telling her anything. He was going to try to surprise her with it, but she beat him out to the front yard before he could stop her.

“I love it!” she squealed, running towards it, Alex hot on her heels.

It looked even better than he had thought it would. Alex’s plane was pretty basic - red and white frame, clear fixtures, not that exciting. But for Isabelle he had gone all out. It was a giant goose, literally; the wings of the plane painted the wings of a goose, the spine of the plane extending out, a giant goose head stretching out over the front nose, crazy details in the painted on feathers. It looked just as he’d drawn it.

They got to work immediately; fall was drawing nearer and nearer by the day and they were starting to get down to the wire. Natalie and Nick spent every waking hour in the shop, in charge of the logistics of the trip. Alex had to teach Isabelle to fly, and he had to do it quickly.

Technically, flying ultralights was the easiest way to fly - you couldn’t carry passengers so there was no license required, no tests, no medical requirements. Alex tried to make it even easier for Isabelle. The two planes were different in a lot of ways; Alex flew his with a joystick, whereas Isabelle’s had a fly bar. All she had to do to take off was push the bar forward and up; to turn, she just had to move the bar one way or the other. To put down she pulled back. That was it. The hard part was the twelve foot wingspan over her head.

They started out with a partner flight. Alex folded himself into the seat of Isabelle’s plane, made difficult by the fact that it had been designed to her specifications and Alex was a full foot taller than her, at least. It got even more awkward when Isabelle had to squeeze herself into the small space in front of him, settling herself in between his legs and grabbing onto the flight bar. Alex shifted uncomfortably, not because he was cramped, but because he hadn’t been this close to Isabelle in years.

The two of them had a weird relationship. Isabelle had never had much of a family growing up, so she spent a whole lot of time over at the Ludwig house, Alex and the twins treating her like one of their own. As they got older, Alex’s relationship with her turned less familial and more romantic. They had quite a few close calls throughout high school, inching closer and closer to hooking up, but never actually following through.

And then she’d just left. She hadn’t even said anything to him; they’d finished high school, graduated, and then she was gone. She hadn’t told him where she was going, nothing. He didn’t try to get ahold of her after she left, figuring that if she wanted to talk to him, she would.

He’d been mad at her for a while. She’d been his best friend, been there through everything. It was like she’d just given up. But Alex couldn’t hold a grudge, especially against Isabelle. So when he’d heard she was coming back, he knew he would never bring up how they’d left things. They had a second chance to make things right, to get back to how they used to be. He’d be an asshole to give that up.

So Alex sat there behind her for hours at a time, teaching her how to take off smoothly, the right angle to take a turn at, how to spot and navigate, how to put the plane down as lightly as possible.

After some solid work, it was time for her first solo flight. Isabelle was sitting in her plane on the side lawn where they did all their take offs from, testing things out, running through things in her head, repeating everything Alex had said to her during their tandem flights.

“Hey Belle.” Natalie popped up next to her, resting one arm on the upper frame of the plane. “You all set for this?”

Isabelle took a deep breath. “As ready as I can be.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve seen a lot of pilots in my day, and you’re a natural.”

“You think?”

“Hell yeah.”

Nick came sprinting over to double check everything before take off, running his hands over everything. “You all set, Belle?”

“Roger that.”

Alex was on the field now, coming over to her and slipping on his helmet. “Alright, Belle.” He leaned down over her, checking the flight bar one last time. “Now that I’m not in there with you, you’re gonna be a lot lighter; you’ll go a lot faster, take off will be easier, you’ll climb really fast, okay? But fly the same as we practiced - just a slow, smooth, push out of the bar.”

“Got it.” She zipped her jacket all the way up to her throat, shoving her hands into the flying gloves attached to the bar. Alex patted her on the shoulder, giving it a slight squeeze before jumping into the seat of his plane, rolling out his shoulders before belting himself in.

As soon as he was ready, Nick and Natalie started their engines, Isabelle rolling forward first. Slow, smooth, push out of the bar, she heard Alex repeating over and over in her head. As she began to reach the edge of the field, fence looming in front of her, picking up speed, she did just that, muscling the bar straight out and up, and the wheels of the plane left the field.

It still made her heart race every time, and this flight was no exception. She was actually flying - who would have thought just a few months ago that she would be here? She turned smoothly to the right, a big sweeping arc over the field. She could see the entire property below her - the farmhouse, the barn, the outbuildings, the hills and the forest and the stream, the edge of the property that was still ripped up from early spring when the bulldozer had gone through. Natalie, Nick, and Gaia were just tiny figures below her, sitting in the grass next to the goose cage. They disappeared behind a hill as she turned, flying over the barn to the back of the property.

Back on the ground, a situation was starting to form. One of the geese, most likely Maverick, had reached the string hanging down from the locking mechanism, nosing his beak through the chain link of the fence. It had only taken him a few practice tries to get to it, pulling it down and springing them free from their cage. The geese were in the air before anyone even realized it.

“Mama Goose!” Nick was yelling into his walkie talkie. “Come in, Mama Goose!”

There was only static on the end of the line, Isabelle not answering.

“Papa Goose, do you read me?”

“Loud and clear,” Alex’s voice came over the line, a bit crackly. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve got a jail break down here.”

Alex looked around; they were pretty far from the side lawn at this point, heading away from the farm, and he couldn’t see anything. “What?”

“They took off, saw Isabelle, got pissed off that she was gone, I guess. What’s up with her radio?”

“Not sure,” Alex replied. “I thought I checked it before we left. Maybe the batteries are bad or something?”

“Can you get her a visual?”

“I’m on it.”

Alex began to speed up, trying to maneuver his plane next to hers. That’s when he saw them - fourteen geese coming in hot, making a beeline straight towards Isabelle. He finally managed to get directly next to her, getting her attention and tapping on his radio.

Isabelle looked down at her radio; the jack had come loose, probably during take off. She quickly reached down, plugging it in. “Papa Goose - this is so cool!”

Alex couldn’t help but smile at the pure enthusiasm in her voice - there was nothing like flying. Nick’s voice came over the radio as soon as he heard Isabelle. “Mama Goose, who’s that on your right shoulder?”

She whipped her head around. “What the hell - Ace!”

Alex honestly couldn’t believe what was happening; the geese were flying in a V, Isabelle’s plane in the center. His idea had actually worked; he had convinced himself that it would, but seeing it here, coming to fruition in front of him was astounding.

“We’ve got one very unhappy bird down here,” Natalie was saying.

“C’mon, Mav!” Isabelle called into her radio. They could hear him squawking at the sound of her voice. Down on the ground he was hobbling along, completely skewed to one side because of his bad leg and shaved wing.

It was starting to get dark by the time they finally put down, herding the geese back into their cage and hitting the hay. Now that they were sure they could do it, they could take a break.

The logistics of the trip were starting to take shape.

“I know this bird guy down on the coast,” Nick said to Alex the next day, sitting on the porch. The girls were out in the long grass by the pond, doing who knew what. “I can go talk to him, see what he recommends. We still have to figure out where we’re going, where there’s enough space to put down, where they can actually spend the winter.”

“Just get me some maps,” Alex said, leaning back in his rocking chair. “You head down and I’ll map out a general route so that when you get back, all we have to do is solidify the last leg.”

Nick was gone and back in two days. “There’s three hundred acres off the North Carolina coast,” he told them over dinner. “They say we can have it if we get down there by November first. After that they’re going to bulldoze it.”

“What is it right now?” 

“It’s a wild bird refuge - just like tons of marshes and wetland and shit.”

“It’s ours if we just get there by the first?”

“It’s ours.”

The first half of October came and went in a blur. Alex and Nick had to leave for a work trip, so the bulk of the planning was left to the girls. Once they got back, Natalie sat them down to go over everything.

“We’re gonna need four solid days of good weather,” Natalie told them, laying out maps of Canada and the east coast of the United States on the table in front of them. “Leg one is going to be this.” She pointed to a thick black line, inked in permanent marker. “It’s thirty miles to Lake Ontario, and then thirty miles over the lake to the States. From there it’s sixty five miles to rendezvous point number one.” She pointed to a second line. “From there we’ll cross the Appalachian Mountains to rendezvous number two. The third leg will be over Maryland and Virginia. Then we’ll head to this tiny ass town called New Hope. From there it’s only ten miles to Valhalla.”

“You really think this is going to work?” Alex asked, leaning over the map. “We’re counting really hard on them going a hundred and fifty miles a day.”

“The wild ones go a thousand a shot,” Isabelle said. “They’re a bit skinnier afterwards but they do it.”

“I don’t think four days weather cushion is enough,” Gaia chimed in. “I think we should leave the twenty second.”

“Twenty second it is.”

Natalie poured glasses of champagne all around, lifting a glass. “To Valhalla.”

“To Valhalla!”

* * *

They had a plan. There was only a week to go. And they were still having problems.They were flying every day for three hours at a time. Alex was more stressed out than Isabelle had ever seen him. He was constantly walking around yelling that they needed to get them up to five or six hours of flight time with no breaks or they wouldn’t make it in time.

Isabelle spent a lot of her time with Maverick, trying everything she could think of to get him off the ground. He was trying, the poor thing, but it wasn’t going to happen. “What if we just wrap him up in a blanket and strap him in behind you?” Alex said, finally exasperated.

“That’ll be our back up plan,” Isabelle told him stubbornly. “He can fly, I know he can. He just… doesn’t know it yet.”

They were up for their last flight, set to leave early the next morning. It was getting dark, the sun falling over the trees, and Alex was tired. He could only imagine how the geese felt. “Mama Goose,” he said over the radio. “You ready to put down for the day?”

“Might as well,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at him. She started to turn her plane to the right, pushing gently on the bar, when all of a sudden the whole thing shook and jerked sideways. “What the fuck?” she screamed, loud enough for Alex to hear without the radio.

He looked around wildly. “Oh my God,” he yelled before he could stop himself, and Isabelle looked over her shoulder.

“Maverick!” she shrieked. The goose was free falling down towards the thick forest beneath them, clearly hurt. “I hit him!”

“What the hell happened?” Alex yelled into his radio. “What the hell is going on?”

“He got out,” Natalie said, her voice shaking. “Just took off. We lost sight of him behind the barn. What’s going on up there?”

“Isabelle,” Alex said into the mouthpiece. “Take a deep breath. We need to get the rest of them back before it gets too dark. Okay? Just put down on the lawn and we’ll find him.”

They were all on the lawn when Alex and Isabelle landed the planes, Isabelle jumping out and sprinting towards the woods, Alex close on her heels as Gaia quickly put the rest of the geese away, locking them in big cages in the barn. Nick and Natalie followed, handing out flashlights.

“He can’t be far,” Alex assured her. “He’s gonna be fine.”

Shockingly, they found him. They heard him before they saw him, his furious honks echoing through the trees. It was pitch black when Isabelle nearly tripped on him, reaching down and picking him up gingerly. “I can’t tell if he’s hurt,” she said, still on the verge of hysteria.

“Let’s get him back to the house,” Natalie said, putting her hand on Isabelle’s arm and leaning over him. “We’ll take a look at him there.”

It had almost been too easy, Alex thought on their way back. No matter what he had told Isabelle, he had been almost certain that they would never find Maverick. But of course, nothing about this was gonna be easy, something he realized when they got back to the barn and found all of the cages empty, locks cut open.

It took a couple of days to find the birds, another couple of days to come up with a plan. They were horrifyingly behind schedule, only one week away from their deadline. Nick and Natalie went to the city center bright and early, the police station and fire station and park station neatly lined up. “There they are,” Nick whispered, holding binoculars up to his face.

They had all realized they would have to steal the birds back from the park rangers, although Gaia and Natalie were pretty resistant at first. Alex had come up with the plan, assigning a role to everyone and assuring them it would be okay. “We’ll go get them back the morning we leave, so they can’t come arrest us for it,” he said matter-of-factly, like they planned bird heists for a living.

Natalie poked her head out from the tree they were hiding behind. “All of them?” Nick was silently counting, trying not to look as suspicious as he was feeling. 

“Yep,” he said after a few moments. “All there.”

Back at the farm, Alex and Isabelle were packing up. Maverick was wrapped up in a blanket and strapped into a pack, settled right behind Isabelle so that she could feel him every time he moved. They zipped up their flight jackets, settled their helmets on their heads, secured their goggles. They were silent the whole time, thinking about the magnitude of what they were about to do.

Isabelle watched Alex hop into his plane, checking the instruments and snapping his goggles over his eyes. He looked at her and she nodded. Time to go.

Back at the park station, Nick pulled out his radio. “Ground Goose to Papa Goose. What’s your twenty?”

Alex’s voice came over the radio. “On the way, Ground Goose. Be there in five minutes.” Nick could hear the hum of the engines and the wind in the background, Alex’s voice almost drowned out. “Get ‘em ready.”

“Alright, Nat, you’re up,” Nick said, turning to Natalie who was already halfway across the lawn. She disappeared inside the park station, and Nick grabbed the bolt cutters out of his backpack, making his way over to the wall of cages set up outside the station.

“So listen,” Natalie said to the park ranger inside, who was thankfully not Sam. They knew without a doubt he had been the one to confiscate the birds; he had been lurking around the farm for weeks before they went missing. She leaned on the desk. “I was out camping in the backwoods last weekend, and this… I don’t know what it was. This creature came wandering into my campsite, and I was hoping you could tell me what it is.”

The park ranger stared at Natalie, taking in her blue eyes and blonde hair. “Okay,” he said. “What did it look like?”

“About… this size,” she said, measuring with her hands. “Long neck, bald head, some scruff right around here.”

“Bald?”

“Bald. Hey, why don’t you come take a look at it?”

“You brought it here?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “It’s in my truck.”

He followed her outside to her truck, parked on the opposite side of the building, as far away from the cages as they could get. “Where is it?”

“Oh no,” Natalie said, looking in the back of the truck, pulling down the tailgate. There was an empty cage, door flung wide open. “Oh no, it must’ve gotten out.”

“Gotten out?” The park ranger’s voice rose at the end of his question, sounding a little panicked. 

“Listen,” Natalie said, looking around and making sure Nick was nowhere in sight. “We’ll split up. You go that way.” She pointed towards the other side of the city square. “And I’ll go that way.” Back towards the water. “Be careful,” she called after him as he took off at a run. “It bites.”

As soon as he was out of sight, she sprinted towards the back of the building, where Nick was snapping open cages with the bolt cutter. She started grabbing birds, shooing them out of the cages and onto the grass, where they milled around, looking at Nick and Natalie. It was only a couple of seconds later when they heard the hum of the planes, and Natalie put her hand over her eyes, shading them to see Alex and Isabelle coming in hot over the lake.

“Hurry up,” she yelled to Nick, where he was trying to pry open the last cage. It broke free with a bang, Ace flying out.

Isabelle and Alex were practically on top of them now, coming down low over the quad. Natalie and Nick started shooing the birds in the direction they were supposed to go, knowing they only had one shot to get all the geese off the ground. Luckily, they had done enough training that the second the geese saw the planes, they were off, taking off in a flurry of wings and quickly gaining speed to catch up with Isabelle, leading the pack across the quad and back up into the sky.

Nick and Natalie didn’t even stop to look around, hoping against hope that no one was around to see them. They took off at a sprint towards the truck, knowing they only had five minutes to make it to the next phase of the plan.

Up in the air, Isabelle was giddy. “Papa Goose, that was so cool!”

Alex was… well, he was being Alex. “We have a long way to go, Belle. We are approaching an international boundary. We have no permit, no flight plan. We are carrying stolen goods. We have no approval, and we are four days behind schedule.”

He glanced down, watching as Gaia and Natalie took off from the dock, their speed boat cutting a white line in the lake below them. Nick was going to take the truck and circle around to the border, picking up the girls once they made it into the States. “Papa Goose to Wet Goose,” he said over the radio. “How’s it look down there?”

“Down to twenty-one knots,” Gaia said. “How are you doing on fuel?”

Alex checked the gauges. “Ah, two hours at best. Can’t turn back now, but we’re gonna be lucky to make landfall around dark.”

“There’s no way we make rendezvous number one-” Natalie was trying to come up with a new plan when Alex’s plane dropped down a foot, shaking slightly. He heard a giant ripping sound. 

“Ah, shit. The rudder is loose again.”

“Can you fix it when you land?”

“If we land,” he said grimly, glancing back down at the water below them, the sun quickly falling below the horizon. “Oh, we’re in luck,” he said into the radio. “Looks like there’s an air field straight up ahead.”

“Okay,” Natalie said. “Let us know when you’re getting ready to leave in the morning. Once we land, we’re gonna go meet up with Nick.”

“Roger that.”

And that’s when the batteries in the radio went dead. Alex had realized, almost immediately after taking off from the ranger station, that they didn’t have any back ups, meant to ask Natalie to pick some up but had totally spaced what with the rudder situation and stealing from government property debacle.

It was about to get a whole lot worse for Isabelle and Alex.

“Stay tight on me, Belle,” he said. “We’re going down.”

She followed him down to the air base, everything shrouded in darkness. He could barely even see the runway, coming in as slow as possible. They put down without incident, Alex jumping out of the plane as soon as he shut it off, touching the broken rudder carefully. Yep, he’d been right. It was loose, moving in his hand.

“Ah, fuck,” he muttered to himself.

Seconds after the words had come out of his mouth, they were surrounded, cars with sirens speeding up all around them, coming to a stop with a screech. Men poured out of the cars, guns raised.

“Get down on the ground!” they were screaming. “Put your hands up and get down!”

“What’s going on?” Isabelle shrieked, backing up, looking like she was about to make a run for it.

“Get down, Belle,” he said, dropping to his knees and then down onto his stomach on the cold pavement, spread-eagled on the ground. “Just do what they say.”

What the hell was going on? He watched as they took Isabelle down to the ground, one of them putting their knee on his back, keeping him in place.

He figured it out soon enough when they were walked into what was clearly an Air Force base, the men holding their arms tightly behind their backs. They were deposited in an office overlooking an indoor flight bay. The geese were down there, surrounded by guys in Air Force uniforms, all milling around on the concrete.

“You’re kidding me, right?” the officer in charge of the base had said once they explained their story. He stood over them, arms folded, glaring down at them. Alex shifted nervously in his chair, trying not to shoot a look at Isabelle. Below them, they could hear the geese honking, and the officer turned towards the window. “Quit playing with those birds!” he yelled. Alex could see all of the airmen backing away from the geese.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Alex said, speaking up. “It was either land here or land in Lake Ontario.”

“We’re really sorry,” Isabelle said. She shifted in her chair, her hand brushing Alex’s.

“You put my entire base on full alert,” said the officer, his voice rising. “We are going to have to do a mountain of paperwork. You took years off my fighter pilots’ lives. And you’re really sorry?”

Isabelle cleared her throat, her voice only slightly shaky. “We promise we’ll never do it again.”

There was a long pause, the minutes ticking by on the clock behind the officer’s head. Alex stayed silent, waiting for their punishment. He was convinced that he would be charged with a crime and forcibly removed back over the border. Instead, to his shock, the officer started laughing. “Well, okay then,” he said, turning his back on them to look at the birds out the window. “As long as you promise.”

Things were a whirlwind after that. Officer Briggs let them sleep there, the airmen setting up cots next to their planes. They were up bright and early the next morning, having barely gotten a wink of sleep with the echo of the geese honking all night and the adrenaline still coursing through their veins. Before they took off, the airmen fueled up their planes, helping Alex pound the broken rudder back into place, and they all lined up for a picture.

Alex wasn’t sure how it happened, but word had gotten out about what they were doing, and there were a couple of news cameras waiting outside the base that morning as they took off, climbing quickly into the sky and leaving the air base behind. 

As soon as they were back at cruising altitude, Alex got on the radio, holding down the button on his joystick. “Nat?”

“Hey!” Her voice crackled over the radio, loud in their headsets. “What the hell happened?”

Alex quickly explained everything to her. “But we’re back on track now,” he said.

“More than on track. Listen to this.” There was a pause, and Alex realized that Natalie was holding her radio close to the radio in the truck, the voices coming in distant and faint, but clear.

“-and the two of them are heading south with fifteen birds between them-”

“-names like Feathers, Ace, Maverick, and Chuck-”

“-people already gathering at the wetlands in North Carolina, awaiting their arrival-”

Natalie stopped flipping through the channels. “You guys are everywhere.”

* * *

They only had ten more miles to go before they hit their first rendezvous point. They would take a night to rest before they tackled the Appalachian mountains. Nick had been in charge of all of the camping equipment; the back of the truck packed full with tents and sleeping bags and camp stoves and lanterns. He had apparently had one hell of a time getting over the border, trying to explain all of that stuff away. Their plan was to find an empty field somewhere, set up camp, and get as much sleep as they could.

Their plans never worked out. Isabelle should have known that by now.

The sun was starting to go down, and she knew they only had another twenty minutes or so to make it to their rendezvous with the rest of the team before it got dark. They would be cutting it close. All of a sudden, the air was filled with honks, a giant cloud of geese appearing on the horizon to their right. Their birds veered away from them, heading towards the other geese.

“Hey!” Isabelle yelled. “Come back here!”

“It’s the wild ones, Belle,” Alex said over the radio. “We’ve gotta follow or we’ll lose them.”

They veered to the right, getting as close to the flock as they dared. That’s when they heard the gunshots.

“Fuck!” Alex had pulled his plane up next to Isabelle’s, and she could hear him swearing. “Hunters.”

Isabelle craned her neck, looking over the side of her place as much as she could. Maverick, strapped in behind her, was squawking wildly. She could see a couple of hunters on the shore of the small lake beneath them, guns pointed upwards, and she pulled the bar back, the plane dropping quickly. “I’m going to get in front of them,” she said over the radio, and she could see Alex peeling off in the other direction, hemming in the flock on the other side.

She got so close to the hunters she could see their faces, heard one of them yell “Holy shit!” as she buzzed over their heads. Once they were sure the hunters were done shooting, they landed on a field next to the small lake, the long grassy expanse the perfect place to put their planes down. She unbuckled herself, hopping out and cracking her back before turning back to pull Maverick out of the space behind her, unwrapping him and pushing him towards the water. She could see her geese in a small clump, slightly removed from the wild ones that had also put down in the pond, and she was satisfied that they would stay there until they decided what to do next.

Alex was inspecting the rudder on his plane, which was flapping loose again. “Damn it,” she heard him mutter as she came up behind him, zipping her flight jacket further up her neck. 

“Is it going to be okay?”

He whipped around, like she had scared him. “Yeah, yeah,” he said quickly. “Don’t worry. I’ll duct tape it tomorrow morning before we leave.”

He was just grabbing his phone to call Natalie, see where they were at and if they could meet them with the camping supplies, she figured, but he froze, his eyes catching on something in the trees behind her. 

“Alex?” she said. “What is it?”

“Don’t move,” he said quietly through gritted teeth, slowly raising his hands in the air. “Don’t turn around.”

She had never been a good listener, and she whipped around to see a rifle pointed at her, her breath catching in her throat. When they had planned this trip out, it had not crossed their minds that they would have guns pointed at them more than once. It was getting a little old, to be honest.

She peered around the gun, her eyes trying to adjust to the darkness of the forest in front of them. “You’re shooting the birds from planes now?” she heard a creaky voice say, and as the shapes in front of her started to make sense, she saw it was an old woman, white-haired and hunched over, the gun huge in her hands. “How low can you all stoop?”

“No,” Isabelle said slowly. “That’s not-”

“Hold on.” The gun lowered a couple of inches, Isabelle’s heart rate relaxing with every second. “Aren’t you the couple I saw on TV?”

Her name was Esther, and she lived in an old farmhouse in the middle of the woods, completely isolated from everything, save for a narrow dirt road. As soon as she realized who they were, she apologized profusely, told them she’d had a hell of a time trying to keep hunters off her land. “It’s cool,” Alex said, his voice still a little shaky. “Don’t worry about it.”

Once she figured out they were planning to sleep outside, she insisted they stay with her, inviting them in and making them pancakes. They sat in front of the television as the sun lowered in the sky, plunging the house into darkness, and they saw themselves, saw the planes and the birds streaking across the television screen, the news anchors talking about them and their journey and the geese. “It’s crazy, right?” Isabelle said, forking a piece of pancake into her mouth.

“Crazy,” Alex said. He had finished his food in about three minutes flat, gulping down three glasses of milk. He was stretched out on the ground, one arm over his head. 

Isabelle watched as the camera cut to the scene at Valhalla. “Holy shit,” she breathed, trying to keep her voice down so Esther didn’t hear her swear. There was a crowd already gathered, people who looked like environmentalists and activists. They were sitting on the ground, bulldozers lined up on the perimeter of the wetlands, the engines roaring.

“We’re set to begin construction on November first,” a man was saying into the camera. He was wearing an expensive suit and looked like he had never done a day’s worth of hard labor in his life. The words on the screen proclaimed that he was the head of the development company. “If they aren’t here by November first, we are breaking ground.”

Alex snorted. “Don’t hold your breath, buddy.” 

The exhaustion hit Isabelle suddenly, a wave crashing over her. They had had a couple of really long days, and she hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before at the Air Force base. Esther showed them up to the attic, which was tiny and warm and perfect, a couple of twin beds pushed up against the wall with a nightstand in between them. Isabelle fell into the one closest to the window, the moon full and bright outside.

She thought that she would fall asleep once her head hit the pillow but she couldn’t turn her mind off. She tossed and turned, trying to stay as quiet as possible so that she wouldn’t wake up Alex when he spoke up. “Belle,” he whispered. “You awake?”

Isabelle rolled over, switching on the lamp. “Hey.”

He turned towards her, propping his head up on his arm. “You can’t sleep either, huh?”

She shook her head, pulling the blankets up to her chin. The two of them had been living in such close quarters for the past few months, but they hadn’t spent a ton of time alone together, not with the revolving door of people always circling through the farmhouse. “No,” she said. “Too much on my mind, I guess.”

She didn’t know what she expected Alex to say, but it certainly wasn’t what he said. “Do you remember we dated in, like, third grade?”

Isabelle bunched up a pillow, rolling over on her stomach to face him and shoving it under her elbows, leaning forward. “I totally forgot about that.” She thought back to the Alex she had known for her entire childhood, trying to equate that little kid with the man in front of her now.

“You know, technically we never broke up.”

She laughed. “You’re right. Wow, I’ve cheated on you a lot.” 

She barely managed to dodge the pillow he threw at her head. “Can I ask you something?” he asked.

“Shoot.”

He cocked his head to the side, taking a deep breath. “Why did you leave?”

Isabelle knew this would come up eventually. Alex was understanding, but she knew he had to be wondering what had gone on in her life that caused her to just take off. “Honestly…” She hesitated. “I didn’t have a good reason. I just knew I didn’t want to be here forever.”

He was going to push her for an answer. “But why?”

Isabelle sighed. “I don’t know, Alex. I wish I could tell you.” She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. “Can I ask you something now?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you let me come back?”

When she had asked Alex if she could stay with him in Ontario, there had been no hesitation on his part, no questions, no expectations. She remembered how nervous she had felt, sending that text message, not even knowing if his phone number was still the same. Her heart practically beat out of her chest when she saw the little dots pop up, then disappear, then pop up again, and she was expecting him to tell her to take a hike, but he was Alex. He would never do that.

“I shouldn’t have let you go in the first place,” Alex said, his voice low like someone would hear them. “That was my mistake.”

Isabelle’s mouth dropped open, and she wished that the light was off so that he couldn’t see her reaction. “Alex, I-”

“Don’t say anything,” he said quickly. “Please. I just want you to know that… that’s how I felt. That’s how I feel.”

Isabelle rolled over, hugging the pillow to her chest and trying to hide her smile, and he turned the light off, sending them back into darkness and leaving her with her thoughts. “Good night, Alex,” she whispered.

They were up bright and early the next morning, the team meeting them at Esther’s house to see them off, watching as Isabelle called all the geese in from the pond. They came sheepishly, like they were embarrassed that they had taken off like that the day before. It only took a few minutes to get everything packed into the planes, and they took off, rising up into the sky, the geese in a line between them.

Everything was blanketed in fog, and Alex was in the midst of a freak out because he had forgotten batteries for the GPS. “Listen, Belle,” he said over the radio, and she could hear him trying to control the stress laced through his voice. “My guess is that we’re still west of Baltimore, so just keep on a straight course and we’ll be good.”

She squinted, trying to see through the thick fog in front of her. “You got it.” She glanced over her shoulder to make sure that the birds were all still there, turning back just in time to see the wing of her plane narrowly miss clipping the side of a skyscraper. “Oh shit!” she yelled, jerking her plane to the left.

“Fuck!” Alex swore. They were smack in the middle of downtown Baltimore. “Fuck, just stay on the main streets, Isabelle! Follow the main streets!” She pulled back on the fly bar, trying to slow herself down, weaving through the buildings. She could see people rushing up to the windows, pointing, their palms pressed against the glass. 

Somehow, inexplicably, they made it through the city unscathed, leaving it in their wake as they flew out over more farmlands. Isabelle took a couple of deep breaths, pressing the radio button. “Don’t worry about it, Alex,” she said quickly, knowing that he was going to beat himself up for that one. “We’re fine.”

“What the hell happened?” Natalie’s voice crackled over the radio.

“We got a little off track,” Isabelle said. “We’re fine though.”

“What do you need from us?”

“You guys go on ahead,” Alex said. “Set up the runway and stuff. We’ll see you soon.”

“You got it,” Nick said. “See you there.”

“Be safe.”

“You too.” 

They were only about an hour away, and Isabelle could taste victory. It had taken so much time, planning, training for them to get to this point, and when she looked back at the person she had been when she showed up in Ontario, a couple of bags and a broken heart, she never could have guessed that this was where she would be now. Maverick shifted against her back, letting out a little squawk. “Almost there, Mav,” she said. “Just hang in there.”

That’s when Alex’s plane went down.

She heard the ripping sound, even though she was twenty feet in front of him, heard him yell something, turned in her seat to see his plane spiraling down to the ground. It was a cliche, she knew, but it was like it was happening in slow motion. The plane looked like it was floating, and she saw it hit the ground in the cornfield. She knew that she screamed his name, knew that she dropped her plane like a stone into the field, knew that she ran through the stalks of corn, slapping them out of her way, but she didn’t remember much of that.

The field opened up once she got to the plane, corn smashed down to the ground and Alex kneeling in the wreckage of his plane, his arm held tight to his side. “Alex!” She skidded to a stop next to him, pushing pieces of plane out of her way to get to him, slamming into him. He put his good arm around her, holding her tight.

“I’m okay,” he said over and over. “It’s fine. I’m okay.”

They made their way out of the corn, going to sit underneath a tree at the edge of the field. The geese followed them, circling around them and folding their legs underneath them. “My shoulder is dislocated,” Alex said. “I popped it back in, but it doesn’t feel great.” He kept his arm clamped to his side, trying not to move. They had been trying to get ahold of Natalie, but their radios were turned off, probably charging since Alex had told them to go on ahead.

“Okay, so now what? You come in my plane with me?”

Alex shook his head grimly, his lips pressed together in a tight line. “We can’t. You’re already low on fuel, and I’m too heavy.”

It took a few moments for Isabelle to realize what he was saying to her. “No,” she said quickly. “No, absolutely not. I’m not leaving you here.” 

“Isabelle.” Alex leaned forward, grabbing her shoulder. “It’s only an hour away. You can do it.”

She shook her head vehemently. “No. I can’t. Not without you.” The tears were rising up behind her eyes, and she knew her voice was coming out rough. “I can’t go without you.”

“You can,” Alex said firmly. “You’ve done it before.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You went off and followed your dream,” he said. “You’ve got that strength in you. You can do it again.”

“Alex, I-”

“Leven is with you,” he said, and her heart jumped in her chest at the sound of her best friend’s name. She hadn’t talked about Leven much with Alex, hadn’t said much more than the basics. She hadn’t been sure she could handle it. “She’s right next to you,” he said, his voice soft. “She’s in the geese. She’s in the sky. She’s all around you.” He leaned forward, resting his forehead against hers. “She’s not going to let you down, Isabelle.”

Isabelle looked at him, sitting in front of her, injured and broken and still managing to tell her that she was strong, telling her to leave him there and go on ahead. She closed her eyes, blocking out the sound of the geese and the road next to them and the wind moving through the trees, and instead she thought about Leven.

She knew Alex was right. Leven would never leave her. The fact that she went running back home after Leven died didn’t mean she wasn’t strong. Look how far they had come.

She opened her eyes. Alex was still staring at her, and he laced his fingers through hers in her lap. Listen,” he said. “You take that plane, you take those geese, and you fly away. Don’t look back. Just go.” He squeezed her hand before releasing it, and she stood up. There was so much she wanted to say, but she knew they were up against the clock. She would have the chance to say it when they finished this.

“Okay,” she said, backing away, not wanting to take her eyes off him. “I’ll see you there?”

“I’ll see you there.” He nodded. “Go west until you hit New Hope,” he called after her as she started sprinting towards her plane, the geese following her. “Then follow the river for ten miles. Look for a lot of cars and people!”

“You got it!” She kept her eyes on him as she took off, pulling away from the field and leaving him behind, the wreckage of the plane scattered on the ground. She wouldn’t let him down.

* * *

Alex sat in the grass, clutching his arm and watching Isabelle’s plane disappear into the sun, the line of geese trailing behind her. He kept watching as long as he could, realizing eventually that he needed to get the hell up and make his way to Valhalla so that he would be there when she landed.

He got up, a pain in his chest at the thought of leaving his broken plane behind. He loved that thing. He tried to get ahold of the team one more time, kicking himself for telling them to go ahead. He made it up the embankment to the road, zipping his flight jacket up tight, his arm trapped inside. There wasn’t a car in sight, and he stood there for fifteen minutes waiting for one to come by that he could flag down. Thankfully, the nice family inside took pity on him and told him to hop in.

Alex kept his eye on the sky as they drove towards New Hope, but he knew they had passed Isabelle by now. Still, he didn’t look away, hoping that she could sense that he wanted to be up there with her. 

When he was dropped off at Valhalla, he could barely hear anything over the roar of the bulldozers. He scanned the crowd, looking for Gaia and his siblings, finally spotting them towards the front of the giant crowd and elbowing his way towards them. He grabbed Natalie’s shoulder, and she whipped around, doing a double take when she saw him.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she screamed over the noise. He shook his head.

“Plane went down. Belle is still up there.”

“What?” Gaia shrieked in his ear. 

“It’s fine,” Alex said quickly. “I’m fine and she’s fine. She’ll be here soon.” He looked around. “Um… It’s crazy here.”

“Tell me about it.” Nick leaned over Gaia to fill him in. “The construction people are getting more pissed off by the second. If she’s not here in the next hour, I guarantee they start digging.” As if on cue, the few rows of people in front of them sat down, led by a group of environmentalists, all of them staring up at the bulldozers and making it very clear that they would refuse to move.

“She’ll be here,” Alex said firmly. “I believe in her.”

“I do too,” Natalie said. “But it’s crazy hectic here. She hasn’t ever landed a plane in a situation like this.”

Alex knew that Natalie was right. He kept looking up at the sky, kept thinking he heard the familiar buzz of Isabelle’s plane coming over the sand dune behind them, but all there was was blue sky. “Hey!” he yelled, the people in their general vicinity turning to look at him. It wasn’t loud enough; his voice was shot, his throat sore from being up in the wind and the cold for so many days.

“Shut up!” Natalie screamed, and all of a sudden everyone was quiet. The construction workers even shut off the bulldozers, chagrined into silence. Everyone was looking at them, suddenly recognizing the man standing in front of them.

“Please,” Alex said as loudly as he could, his voice breaking. “My friend is up there by herself. She should be here any minute. Please.”

The entire valley was quiet, a couple hundred people crammed in between two sand dunes. Alex closed his eyes, Nick and Natalie practically holding him up on either side of him. He was exhausted and starving and cold. His shoulder hurt. His throat hurt. His ribs and head and ankle hurt. All he wanted was a really hot shower and a chocolate chip waffle and to sleep in his own bed, and even more than that he wanted Isabelle to get here safe. He wanted them all to go home.

He had been trying desperately not to think about what he had said to Isabelle last night, but he hadn’t been able to sleep because his own dumb words were playing on repeat in his brain. “I shouldn’t have let you go in the first place.” Come on, Alex. It’s not like she was sitting around in Seattle pining for him. 

Isabelle had always been larger than life and so much bigger than Ontario. He had always known that she was going to leave the second they walked across that stage and got their diplomas. It was no surprise to him that when she did end up coming back, she conquered this adventure with the same force that she did everything else.

“She’s coming!” someone shrieked, and the whole crowd turned around at once to look at the girl at the top of the sand dune, pointing behind her. Alex’s heart leaped, and he couldn’t move, his feet stuck to the sand. Natalie, thankfully, took charge as she always did, clapping her hands and yelling at everyone, organizing the crowd and pushing people aside to make a runway.

A few seconds later, the plane shot over the sand dune, the crowd letting out a cheer. Alex watched Isabelle pull back on the bar, setting the plane down on the makeshift runway smoothly. The geese continued on over her head, dropping down into a pond on the far side of the crowd. People started pushing towards the plane, trying to get as close as possible to her, and Nick grabbed Alex’s good arm, pulling him along and shoving their way through the crowd to get to her.

Isabelle was looking around for him, tears streaking across her face as she pulled her flight helmet off and threw it down on the seat. Once he was close enough, he grabbed her arm, hauling her out of the plane. She threw her arms around his neck, burying her face in his shoulder. “I told you, Belle,” he said in her ear. “I told you that you could do it.”

Alex had a plan: they were going to go to a hotel, sleep for a day and a half, and then make their way back at home. At some point, he was going to have to broach the subject of what was going to happen next, whether Isabelle was going to stay, how he really felt about her, whether she felt the same way. So much time had passed since high school, and so many things had happened. He was going to take it slow.

Isabelle had other ideas, as she always did. She pulled back, hooked her arms around his neck, and kissed him, right there in front of everyone. He forgot about the pain in his arm and how tired he was and what they had just gone through; all he could focus on was her.

“Come on, Alex,” she said eventually. “Let’s go home.”

* * *

“Belle. Belle. Belle!”

“What?” Isabelle hissed, rolling over and shoving her elbow into Alex’s side. “I swear, you are the worst alarm clock ever.” He had the curtains wide open, early morning sun streaming in the window.

“Okay, I feel you,” he said. “But look.”

She rolled over him, squinting at the glare of the sun off the melting ice in the pond in front of the farmhouse. “Holy shit!”

Right on schedule, four months later, the geese were back.

**Author's Note:**

> this is the third fic in a row in which i have hurt alex. please don't come for me.


End file.
